In 1930, a Filipino immigrant named Fermin Tobera was shot and killed by white men in Watsonville, California, an all-too-common and mostly unpunished hate crime in the US at a time when they weren’t even labeled as such. Randy Ribay uses this period and this murder as the starting point in his new young adult…
Anne Anlin Cheng grew up in Taiwan and moved to Savannah, Georgia with her parents and brother as a school-aged girl. Having learned English as her second language, she majored in English literature in college (“to my parents’ horror”), earned a PhD, published books on race and gender, and worked her way up the ladder…
Those who have come of age since the 1973 oil embargo should have no great difficulty accepting the outsized importance of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region. From oil and gas to, more recently, airlines, finance, media and football teams, the countries of the Gulf have influence that far exceeds traditional measurements of power…
For much of his life, Jay Prosser was uncertain of where he belonged. He was “Jewish and not, British and Asian, Iraqi, English, Welsh, Chinese”. With a military father, his family moved often. At a boarding school, he was dubbed a “half-caste”. At synagogue, he felt like an imposter. Prosser’s memoir, Loving Strangers, tells the…
When thinking about the most important World War II generals on the Allied side, the name Hastings Ismay does not come immediately to mind. But it should. Throughout the war, he was Winston Churchill’s right arm, serving as his chief staff officer in the Defense Ministry, Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet, and as a…
In Indonesia, the colonial past has a conspicuously low profile in public consciousness and political debate, but the national revolution—”Revolusi” in Bahasa Indonesia—that threw off colonial rule once and for all nonetheless remains the single most defining moment in the country’s history. Countless murals, quirky dioramas, annual Independence Day celebrations, place names, monuments, official and…
Identical and inseparable twin sisters, Roya and Tala live in Tehran. When they fall pregnant around the same time, they dream of going through the same motherhood milestones together and raising their kids together, yet a freak accident destroys these dreams in a matter of moments. This is the backdrop of Nahid Rachlin’s latest novel,…
Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved…
Fiction set in the time of Indian freedom struggle draws attention to the lives of ordinary people against the background of great socio-political upheavals. That this period’s history can be juxtaposed with personal stories about being queer is the achievement of translator and scholar Ruth Vanita’s second novel A Slight Angle.
Gerda Philipsborn, Jewish and a part of the 1920s Berlin arts scene, developed a close friendship with a trio of Muslim Indian students. A decade later, she would move to India to join her friends at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Aligarh that was established in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions….
Like many stories, Amy’s begins long before she was born. Amy is an “all-American” young woman from Hawaii, but author Sherri L Smith and illustrator Christine Norrie start their graphic novel Pearl in 1886 in Japan, where Amy’s sosōbo (great-grandmother) is a pearl diver from Okinawa.
The influence of China on Japanese arts, culture and thought has been enormous. Yet, it varied widely across time. Periods of intense exposure and assimilation, as when the archipelago adopted Buddhism in the 6th century along with the logographic script that made its transmission possible, were often followed by decades, if not centuries, of distancing…
Pity the poor archaeologists who lie on their bellies in sand or mud and painstakingly dust off bits of fossilized wood or bone, ceramics or metal scraps. It is, however, from their patient work that scientific truth progresses. Our understanding of the natural history of the horse has galloped ahead in the 21st century. As…
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War…
In Sheela Tomy’s new novel, the foreign observer of Israel and Palestine is not the archetypal Westerner, but a middle-aged Indian woman. Translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S, Do Not Ask The River Her Name weaves the past and future into a blood-filled present to tell an emotional and urgent tale.